Bringing GenAI to mobile gaming.

I worked as the Director of Business development for a local company that specialised in high-end cabinetry, furniture and other custom pieces. I was tasked with building out the sales and marketing. I didn’t do a great job at the marketing per se, but I was able to grow revenue under contract for the next 24 months by a couple million. It taught me how to grow businesses from the ground up and make deals happen from cold calling.

I worked as an intern at Latin Leap throughout the summer part-time. Based out of Medellín, I was attracted to the LATAM market and the opportunity to dive back into early-stage technology investing. My role consisted of screening founders on Zoom calls and making suggestions on whether or not to pass the company on to the IC. I also participated in the Latin Leap Series podcast and interviewed LATAM founders. I learned a lot about emerging markets and how technology transfers across different continents.

October 2022 through April 2023 I came up with, refined, pitched and fundraised for an idea behind immigration called E-Migrate. In January of 2022 I signed a contract for 12.5% of equity in the company with a consortium of 13 Angel investors from my personal network in exchange for $130K to deployed in tranches of ~$10K for the next 12 months based on milestones. The idea made its way through several iterations but ultimately we decided to scrap it after a while. I, in conjunction with the board, didn’t believe there was enough conviction behind the idea. Simply put the time was not right.

I started as the 7th employee at Altitude AI 6 months after its inception. Our founder was Ivy League educated and had experience at top tech companies for a decade. He started the company with a vision of enabling robots with better computer vision through machine learning and artificial intelligence. My main roles were to send out marketing campaigns both on the business development side as well as the investor relations side of the company. After I left the company we had built an MVP, had revenue under contract and had raised our first round of outside capital from private investors.

Crewe Capital was a great time. We worked on the Merger & Acquisition side of the firm. The value I got from the internship stemmed mostly from the people I met. The team at Crewe is amazing and taught me the basics of investment banking. As well as getting live transaction on the sell-side I was able to connect with the other interns. All of us were subsequently able to land a summer internship in banking for that following summer. They remain some of my favourite friends to this day. I worked on 4 different deals that semester while holding down school and a full-time night job, what a time.

Working at RLG Capital had to be my favourite experience as an undergraduate student. The management team consisted of home-grown talent mostly from HBS. As an independent sponsor we raised capital on a deal-to-deal basis. Throughout that summer I was able to be in-person a couple time a week to deeper understand PE. Although I was constrained on time due to my other commitments I was given responsibility to work on transactions. The other intern and I made market research presentations for bolt-on acquisitions as well as presented in front of C-Suite executive teams. This was an unpaid position but it had to be the most valuable to me because it taught me what I enjoyed in work, how to attain that and opened up next steps.

At Cottonwood Residential I earned an understanding of RE investing. Being at a REIT, I underwrote large multi-family acquisitions +$300M. The team was super helpful in getting me started and I didn’t yet have a great foundation in a lot of areas of business. I also screened investment opportunities by reading and making recommendations on OM’s. I usually plugged in different variables from my due diligence into the company templates to come to an understanding of each project’s risk level. My favourite thing was learning about how to run different comparables for RE. I corroborated both precedent transactions and public comparables to come to my valuations.

Clearstone Associates was my first introduction into Private Equity investing. I was exposed to several projects, my favourite being a potential acquisition in the academic e-learning space. It was fun to learn about different valuation methodologies and put them into practice while creating my first models and marketing presentations.

Through the Summer of 2020 I worked my first internship at Banyan Ventures. It was a great introduction into investing and high-finance as a whole. We got a holistic overview of roles in the industry as well as training from business professionals from across the Salt Lake valley.

For half of the summer of 2020 I knocked doors selling pest control. The second half of the summer I mainly worked as a technician on the houses that the others salesmen in our division had sold. Good memories with great people. Definitely not easy work. I learned I’m not the best of salesmen, but I like to get my hands dirty. I already knew the second part. So, from that point on I worked on my sales skills even further.

My very first internship. Before my LDS mission I was excited about the arts and in specific, graphic design. Struck took me on essentially as a charity case and saw potential in my abilities. I studied graphic design in high school and took concurrent enrollment courses at our local community college. I designed stickers, t-shirts and other original art pieces over the course of my last two years of high school. I originally thought that graphic design was my path. I ultimately changed course because I thought that graphic designers were underpaid and that the design and arts industry as a whole is difficult to break into and make consistent money in. Hence why I pursued finance three years later. While at Struck I worked on many different projects. They let me see a lot but I wasn’t able to contribute much based on my knowledge being almost entire isolated to Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop at the time. My favourite project was in conjunction with Nickelodeon in helping envision a hanging art piece for their then new HQ in Los Angeles.

My very first job that I got all on my own. After finishing my senior year of high school football my father saw that I had free time. He told me to get a job, and that I had 24 hours to do so. I went to the local Wendy’s and set up an interview for the next day. I was hired and started the next week. On top of high school obligations I worked a shift from 4:00pm to closing time, 1:00am, five days a week including weekends. I actually enjoyed it. I learned how to operate all of the different functions of a classy, fast-food restaurant. Haha. I learned how to work with characters from all over the world who spoke different languages and came from very distinctive backgrounds. I learned how to make a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger, my proudest achievement and often dreamt at night of packaging burgers, fries and chicken nuggets. Eventually, my dad told me that this was not normal and that I should find a different job. So, my short stint at Wendy’s was over and I went back to building foundations and doing other grunt labour for a neighbour of mine at his construction company over the next 5 or so years until my junior year of college. Wendy’s, among my many different jobs, is probably my most valuable and cherished job experience.